Dear Bleaders,
I used to worry about getting enough sleep to write, but then I heard a poet I love, James Tate (1943-2015), interviewed on Youtube, and when a voice asks him how he recharges his batteries, Tate says “I believe in part in writing out of exhaustion” and “I like to work sometimes when my batteries are very low.”
Well okay then. It hadn’t occurred to me. I tried it out and I found that it was at least as true as the idea that I needed to be well rested and in my rightest mind.
For a while now I have opened the door to my insomnia, let it call the shots. Someone had asked if maybe I just wasn’t getting enough exercise to be tired, and I thought Oh I’m not awake when I shouldn’t be, I’m just awake. “Right, I’ll sleep when I sleep.” Sometimes it’s mostly the struggle that tightens things up. Newly freed, I’m drinking coffee at all hours since I’m going to be awake anyway. I realize that eventually I’ll have to cut that from the curriculum.
For now I like being up in part because I make things at night. Writing the last book took a lot of years and the eye gets tired of staring at black and white text, ants crossing a bleached desert of sheet. (Metaphors inside metaphors!) Nowadays I want color and pictures, I want to wrestle with the big what and the little whys in material, not only ideas.
What would I have said if the interviewer had asked me the question? How do I recharge my batteries? I suppose I’d say, “I don’t have batteries; no one does anymore, we all have chargers.” Because everything changes and the losses come at us with the speed with which we lose our Apple pencils. Slippery little bastards.
The Oscars are Sunday and those of us who celebrate may consciously experience it as ritual. After all LA doesn’t have seasons so much, so it makes sense to have bright events to help people feel the year go by. That’s a big part of the staying power of all these holidays and annual cultural pops. They last because we need them. We need them to help us feel the year go by—to know where we are in time. If we feel a bit floating outside of time, we could stamp our feet to its beat by taking part in yearly rituals a bit more robustly.
In The Wonder Paradox I argue that we are poetic, unlikely beings not well matched to our emotional conditions, and we need help living poetically, following the rhythms of the day—week, year, lifetime —swinging from celebration to celebration to distract us from how mediocre any given day’s celebration may have been. Sometimes we’re the angle on top of the tree but other times nothing works our way, and sometimes everything goes perfectly but we still have a hard day. There’s a Kobayashi Issa (1763–1828) poem I think of here (translation Robert Hass).
New Years Day
Everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.
Keeping a ritual does not mean being actively happy while doing it nor that everything goes right. In any given year, many of us miss a lot of the rituals we enjoy. We didn’t get to the parade, didn’t kiss anyone at midnight, and no candy changed hands. In another way, the full Oscar ritual might include the prep, that is, having seen any of the movies. Or many. I have not. Why? I don’t know. They cost money to see and with all that I can watch that I’m already paying for, I don’t. I guess I could argue that it makes more sense to do the ritual in reverse this way, first finding out which films are most loved and making viewing choices from there. But it’s way more fun to watch them sashay around on their teeter-y feet when you know the material. Well, isn’t it always.
The Issa poem suggests that even when it all comes true, it’s still you, or me, it’s still our scuffed up old self that shows up for it. That is a warning about that day when it comes, yes. But it is also a word to those who are still yearning for that New Year’s Day when all is in blossom. Even if/when that faultless day comes, you might still “feel about average.” Therefore, it could be crucial that we learn to feel the good of whatever day we are in. BTW I was able to draft this whilst asleep on my seat, as it were, but I took myself a solid nap before for the polish. A matter of poetry rather than prose? Who knows.
What matters is that we recall that life is absurd and odds are you are above average. May your films win and may all your Apple pencils be found!
Stay well and I shall return to encourage you next week.
love,
Jennifer